Finally, we get to the only crack that actually works properly. Congratulations to Razor1911 for being the only ones not fooled by the game’s trickery."

No surprise here! I was never all that deep in the Warez scene, but every nerdy kid in the early 1990s knew that Razor 1911 were the most l33t game crackers around. It was kind of a mark of quality on any game. If Razor 1911 released it you knew that not only was it cracked competently, it was probably a good game too!

Fairlight was pretty problematic back in the 90's politically, they even did a fairly controversial nazi-themed demo. Definitely not the vibe they give off today.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240406015231/https://www.latim...

One the crack side, I don't really follow much but you can find the occasional release, for example Red Dead Redemption.

It is possible that the crack itself broke the game, but I want to believe it's some genius evil idea someone from Ubisoft came up with.

The 1992 game was able to use the wolfenstein name because the trademark had lapsed the the original company had gone backrupt. While the 1992 game was originally intented to include stealth gameplay, none of those gameplay features from the 1981 game really made it into the final version of the 1992 game.

Key here is that M.U.S.E. sold no rights to id software, did not bless the 1992 game in any way, and there were no personel in common between the two games. They can't really be considered as part of the same franchise

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Making_of_Prince_of...

After a while, you found a machine and when you finally assemble everything and start it....the game stop working and loop in a "we're tired of hacking" message ! Of course, with the cracked version.

And it was clever, because

1) you tried the game and enjoyed it. And now you're frustrated and want to play it, so you might actually buy it

2) the anticopy test was late in the game, so everyone who copied it thought the copy was ok and spreaded it.

A sort of shareware.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWqnM-yyfPQ

This was one of the 2 (!) games I had as original at that time(the other being Sub Battle Simulator), and it had a beautiful map and book. The book would include some details that were asked before the first fencing fight, like "When did ship X leave port Y?" and if you got the answer wrong, as best as I could try (and I did intentionally try to beat that part after giving the wrong answer) you'd always lose it and not be able to start your career.

Tangentially, this phenomenon isn't limited to retro DOS games: Rockstar was caught shipping a pirated version of Midnight Club 2 [0], and Sinking Ship [1] is another example of this in the indie scene.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311522

* Legally they aren't cracks because they are fully authorized distributions of the games

This is way too common. It even happens to the best and largest games - the code for CnC Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 is supposed to be lost to time [1].

Often times it's just IP rights that get passed on when a studio collapses or gets bought out, and in other cases source code for dependencies (e.g. music or video player SDKs) isn't available any more.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197320

People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was having CD emulation software installed (not even running) and some games would already flag you as a pirate.

The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.

  1. It is harder to see if your crack was successfully completed, especially if the degradation happens late in game.
  2. If the game is fun until it goes wonk and the person learns it is pirated, they may decide to buy the real deal.
  3. The potential damage, if you didn't have a noticeable false-positive rate, is limited and for those unwittingly hit and find out their software is pirated, they're likely to not buy/get from the downloaded source again.
  4. From the standpoint of a developer, it is creative fun.

While they are somewhat effective at making pirates miserable, I have my doubts on whether they are actually good at driving sales. Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...

Gates: how piracy worked for me in China - The Microsoft chairman says that bootlegged software is creating a demand for his legitimate products in the longer term

BTW whoever fascinated by the copy protection techniques of legacy systems should also check out this book: "Tome of Copy Protection", from ID (yeah the original Idea from the Deep).

https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...

This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding failed cracks):

https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...

How would you check for something you don't know about? They probably tried the game and when they couldn't win they ascribed it to insufficient skill. Even if they searched for information online, they probably (like OP) found discussions where some people complained about the game being unwinnable and got "you just suck!" replies.

Honestly, it was a dumb thing to do by the original developers.

Devs then and now use poison pills like this to discourage dishonesty, and I don't fault them for it. It's hard to make a living producing digital content that's easily replicated at almost no cost.

And I absolutely fault the developera for it, because it's a stupid, counterproductive thing to do - if nobody knows it happens because the game is pirated, it will just get a reputation for being buggy and deter honest buyers just as much as pirates. So why do it? To secretly "get back" at the pirates?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE

Sorry for stealing your game, I was young.

I still remember, back in the mid 90s, playing it with my brother and some friends. We spent so much time trying to beat the default bobsleigh time, land a 100+ meter jump in the ski jumping event, or survive that dreaded third lap in skating. But no matter what, we just couldn't pull it off.

Years later, I even gave it another shot under Dosbox, thinking, "Alright, I was just a clueless kid back then. Now it's my time to shine." Nope. Still couldn't do it.

Turns out we obviously had a cracked copy. But honestly, trying to actually buy a game when you’re a 12yo in mid-90s France (obviously without any Internet connection) wasn’t exactly easy.

ExOK is generally pretty tolerant of mods, re-distribution, fangames, and even reverse-engineering their code. I'm really surprised they would deliberately make the game awful to play even for pirates.

Edit: Just asked Noel on Discord. Celeste shouldn't be doing anything like that.

> The game doesn't have anything like that in it. The steam version makes sure steam is running before the game starts, but that's it. The itch version literally has nothing in it. [...] Yeah, we don't do anything to go out of our way to stop piracy. People have also decompiled and modded this game in pretty much every way imaginable (which I think is awesome!) so if there was anything like that it'd be very noticeable haha

> Uncovering the mechanics of "The Games: Winter Challenge"

Is there anything where you don't find Fabrice Bellard along the way if you just dig deep enough?

> If you look at the source code of the decompression engine of PKLITE, you'll notice that it looks like the one of LZEXE.

[1] https://bellard.org/lzexe.html

I broke the space key on my dads computer while trying to get a new speed skating record.

I also just really miss printed game manuals.

I played it on a B&W TV.

Also later games that wanted the CD to be in the drive to be played.

I remember removing the copy protection from space quest. There was a later check that checksumed the copy protection code. That complicated the crack.

There have been a couple of times even in modern games like Civ 6 where everything goes so wrong I wonder if somehow it erroneously flagged itself as pirated for some reason.

My favourite variant of this was F-19 Stealth Fighter asking you to do aircraft identification, which you could get from the manual .. or any library book on US warplanes.

Least favourite was some game (TMNT?) which printed the codes in gloss black on matte black.

It wouldn't be out of place in a library.

Not that I turned that knowledge into good results but that's another topic.

What a delight that game and its manual were.

They weren't license keys, persey, as all the printed material was the same, but a tacit test as to whether you had bought the actual game, or just copied the disk.

They were multiple choice and some of them were very tongue-in-cheek, like Richard Nixon was an “audio technician or plumber’s friend”.

We live in a completely different world now. Imagine: you just bought a game, that was probably not cheap, and you won't play it because it requires opening a printed booklet you got with installation media and already have next to you? Sounds unlikely, especially since you already went through the trouble of going/driving to a physical store and installing the game (often from multiple cds/floppies, and it often took a long time). And it's not like you had a choice - another game was another drive away, and there were no refunds.

And yeah, we were younger.

Today we live in a world of constant connectivity and instant gratification. It's a better world, but a little nostalgia won't hurt

It was some sort of "Defender" style game. Apparently cracking ("Cracked by the Nibbler") caused some obstacles to become invisible. You could play the game for a bit but you pretty quickly crashed into one of these.

Wish I could remember the name of the game. I would have liked to played a legit copy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_(video_game)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli

Had 3-D World Runner for the OG NES, played it again a few weeks ago doing some handheld emu hacking and couldn't put it down.

I think the crack protection was pretty clever - it let you play a couple seconds of the game to get a taste of it. If I had the means I would have bought it, but I was a poor 14 year old

https://www.gamesdatabase.org/game/apple-ii/repton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repton_(1983_video_game)

(back then I didn't even know what piracy was, it was just a game that someone gave me)